No, really. There is more than one tower defence game worth talking about. I’ve post the trailers for both of them below. Good times.

The first is the rather lovely cartoon, open-plan 2D tower defence game Revenge Of The Titans, by Puppygames. Alec got pretty hot for their last title, the excellent Droid Assault, which you should all download and play as soon as you’ve read the entirety of the this essential and fascinating piece of tower defence news. The second (pictured above) is the 3D tower defence spectacular of Sol Survivor, which features multiplayer co-op, and multiple “commanders” with orbital attacks and their own repertoire of tower erection abilities. Yeah, I said that out loud. Both games will be out, eventually. Probably. Go take a look at their moving portraits.

I am actually ridiculously excited about this. I don’t even know why, it just looks right.

Then there’s the 1000% more shiny and explody Sol Survivor, for continuous escalating laser-biff, in 3D! Which thrills me a bit less.

But clicking on every sunshine in PvZ was the worst part of the game. Tower Defence is about building up your base and then watching stuff happen. It’s about optimization, not about keeping me busy.
Imagine if you had to click on stuff over and over in Anno 1404 or Sim City. It would just not fit, and it’s the same for Tower Defence.

TD is evolving as a genre, or at least broadening – even Defense Grid didn’t have path-making/path optimization in probably half of its levels. PvZ is definitely different and definitely more approachable, but I think the sunshine/coin collection was a good feature to add in.

It’s a different pace from “traditional” TDs, but the added resource management and action greatly improves it.

I used to think of Tower Defense as its own genre, but i think it’s really just RTS candy-coated and simplified in just the right way to escape the rut that the C&C/Starcraft clones found themselves in.

I think its kind of cool to look at where lots of the big RTS’s went the route of ‘no more bases’ it just took some Warcraft 3 mods and flash games to show us how compelling ‘no more units’ could be. I really hope this can breathe some life back into RTSes, cuz some of my favorite early videogame memories are building ridiculous bases in Dune 2.

Will definitely be getting Revenge of the Titans. Droid Assault is one of the best PC games I’ve ever played.

(Incidentally, if you’ve not played Droid Assault recently, the later updates have tweaked the game extensively – better AI, more capturing and less hiding with zero health. The furthest I’ve got is level 80 – if anyone can get to level 100 they’re probably an actual killer robot.)

Revenge of the Titans and Plants vs Zombies have an additional aspect that I think is more akin to Beer Tapper than Tower Defense. I don’t mind it a bit, it just makes things a little more interactive and slightly less ‘casual.’
A game where you do things in real-time?! The HELL!!!

You do have to click on the factories to collect the money .. but the emphasis of the game isn’t really entirely on factories – you get a lot of cash just for killing the gidrahs.

..and besides, it should come as no surprise there’s a building you can place next to the factories that collects them for you :) And another building that increases the amount of money a factory stores before it’s full. And a building that reloads your turrets for you. But they’re not available until the later worlds – you’ve got to wait for Dr. Zap to research all the cool stuff.

There’s also buildings that generate little tanks that go off and search for gidrahs to shoot at, if you fancy a bit more RTS-sauce. It’s all dead good fun!

I like the look of Revenge of the Titans alot, that cartoonish wasteland is a fine setting. But as an RPS commenter I am obliged to make gameplay judgements based entirely on promotional youtube footage and it struck me as a less elegant version of Harvest. The joy of that game (its own little niche within the sub-genre) was the optimisation of energy collection and distribution, making that process manual seems something of a step backwards.

I’m with Sagan on this: “But clicking on every sunshine in PvZ was the worst part of the game. Tower Defence is about building up your base and then watching stuff happen.”

I think it was a couple of the Three Moves Ahead guys (Tom and Troy?) who said they couldn’t get into TD games because there wasn’t enough to do. I just don’t understand that attitude. The whole distinctiveness of TD games is in setting up, sitting back and making small adjustments as necessary, rather than maximising APM. Fair enough, it’s not for everybody, but trying to make TDs like every other RTS seems to miss the point.

I think there’s a subtle but important difference between the sun in PvZ and what I see here. The sun dropped from the sky randomly, and the period between sunflowers dropping was slightly randomised.

Here, it seems that, whatever they are, generate income at a fixed pace. At least with the sunflowers it was constant, but background and required only a couple of clicks at a time. The wave of clicking in a grid like fashion just seems unimaginative, and seemed to me to break the flow of the video, so maybe the game.

But, obviously, I haven’t played it. Awkward opinion of games from promo videos, Go!

I’ve got to say that Revenge of the Titans looks a little like Destroy All Bugs! writ-large; the open environments, defence of multiple cities and adaptive AI of the enemies all bring it to mind. Even the retro graphics and sounds, though DAB’s were GBA-themed, whereas these are more eclectic, vector/arcade themed.